I Do! (8 page)
“No. I can stay.”
“You’ve been here long enough now. Your mother is probably wondering where you are.”
“My mom won’t mind.” She stomped the ground with one sandaled foot, then took off. She ran in a big circle around Blake. She actually galloped around and around. And God help him, with her head bobbing and her ponytail flying behind her, she kind of resembled a little pony.
Around and around she ran, stopping a few times to paw at the air and neigh. “Hey kid,” he called to her, but she just tossed her head and kept going. The pull of Johnnie rode him hard and irritation broke out across his skin. He had better things to do than stand there as a weird little girl acted like a horse. Better things, like go for a jog or swim or poke himself in the eye with a stick. “Time to go home.” She pretended not to hear him. What did she call herself? “Stop, Bow Tie!”
“Say whoa, girl,” she managed between rapid breaths.
He didn’t take orders from children. He was an adult. He wanted to tear out his hair. Christ almighty. “Shit.”
Around she ran, her pale cheeks turning pink. “That was a bad word.”
Blake frowned. “Whoa, girl.”
She finally stopped directly in front of him and blew out a breath. “I went weally fast.”
“You need to run home.”
“That’s okay. I can play for . . .” She paused before adding, “Five moe minutes.”
He’d lived in a dirt hole and crawled through swamps. He’d eaten bugs and pissed in Gatorade bottles. For twenty years, his life had consisted of hard, rough edges. When he’d retired from the teams, he’d had to make a deliberate effort to keep the F-word out of every sentence and his hand off his nuts. He’d had to remember that in civilian life, creative swearing wasn’t a competitive sport and that ball scratching wasn’t a public event. He had to remember the manners his mother had pounded into his and Beau’s heads. Nice, polite behavior toward everyone from little kids to little old ladies. Today he wanted this kid gone before he ripped his skin off, and he chose not to remember those nice manners. He purposely narrowed his eyes and gave the kid the hard steel gaze that he’d used to make terrorists cower.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
She didn’t seem at all afraid. She was definitely a little slow in the head. Another time he might have taken that into consideration. “Get your ass in your own yard.”
She gasped. “You said a bad word.”
“Go home, little girl.”
She pointed at the cat on the front of her
T-shirt. “I’m a big girl!”
Another day, another time, he might have admired the kid’s guts. He leaned forward and towered over her like his father used to do to him and Beau. “I
shit
bigger than you,” he said, just like his old man.
The kid sucked in a scandalized breath but wasn’t intimidated at all. She wasn’t shaking in her little shoes. Was there something wrong with the kid, besides her thinking she was a horse, or was he losing his touch?
“Charlotte?”
Blake and the kid spun toward the sound of a woman’s voice. She stood a few feet away, wearing a little yellow T-shirt and those shorts he’d had the privilege of seeing from behind. The shadow of a big straw hat hid her face and rested just above the bow of her full lips. Pretty mouth, nice legs, great ass. Probably something wrong with her eyes.
“Mama!” The kid ran to her mother and threw herself on the woman’s waist.
“You know you aren’t supposed to leave the yard, Charlotte Elizabeth.” The shade of her hat slid down her throat and T-shirt to her breasts as she looked down at her child. “You’re in big trouble.”
Nice-size breasts, smooth curve in her waist. Yeah, probably had funky eyes.
“That man is weally mean,” the kid wailed. “He said bad words at me.”
The sudden sobbing was so suspect he might have laughed if he was in a laughing mood. Behind him, Johnnie whispered his name, and in front, the shade of a straw hat rested on the top of a nice pair of breasts. The shadow dipped into her smooth cleavage, and lust plunged straight down Blake’s pants. He went from irritation to desire to a combination of both in the blink of an eye.
The brim of the hat rose to the bow of her lip again. “I heard him.” The corners of her mouth dipped in a disapproving frown.
His frown matched hers. He’d always avoided women like her. Women with children. Women with children were looking for daddies, and he’d never wanted kids. His or anyone else’s.
“Please don’t swear at my child.”
“Please keep your child out of my yard.” Women with children wanted men who wanted relationships. He wasn’t a relationship kind of guy. Out of all the SEAL teams, Team Six had the highest divorce rate for a reason. It was filled with men who loved to throw themselves out of airplanes and get shot out of torpedo tubes. Filled with good men who weren’t any good at relationships. Men like him, and until recently, like his brother. Men like his father, whose wives divorced them after twenty years of serial cheating.
“Fine.” Her lips pursed like she was going to hit him or kiss him. Off the top of his head, he’d guess the former. “But what kind of man talks like that to a child?”
The kind who was white-knuckling his sixty-second day of sobriety. The kind who wanted to pour some Johnnie down his throat, say fuck it, and dive face-first into soft cleavage. “What kind of mother lets her child roam around unsupervised?”
She gasped. “She was supervised.”
“Uh-huh.” He’d made her mad. Good. Now maybe she’d leave. Leave him to his fight with Johnnie and himself.
“Charlotte knows better than to leave our yard.”
He pointed out the obvious. “This isn’t your yard.”
“She’s never run off before.”
He couldn’t see her eyes, but he could feel her angry gaze. All hot and fiery. He liked hot and fiery. He liked it riding him like a banshee. Wild, screaming his name, and . . . Christ. His lust for Johnnie and this nameless woman made him dizzy. “Only takes once for her to get hit by a truck,” he heard himself say between clenched teeth. “I had a dog that only got out once. Bucky ended up as axle grease for a Chevy Silverado.” He shook his head. God, he’d loved that poodle. “He’d been a damn good dog, too.”
Her pink mouth opened and closed like she was speechless. Then she waved a hand at the bottle of Johnnie and obviously found her voice. “Are you drunk?”
“No. Haven’t had a drop.” He wished he could blame his erection on Johnnie.
“Then you don’t have an excuse. You’re just a . . . a . . .” She paused to cover the girl’s ears with her palms. “A raging asshole.”
She’d get no argument from him.
“I heard that,” the kid said into her mother’s stomach.
“Come on, Charlotte.” She grabbed the kid’s hand and stormed off. He could practically see the steam shooting out of her ears.
So much for being the charming twin.
He shrugged, and his gaze fell to her nice butt.
Fuck it. Charming was for nice guys, and he hadn’t felt nice for a very long time.
New York Times
bestselling author RACHEL GIBSON began her fiction career at age sixteen, when she ran her car into the side of a hill, retrieved the bumper, and drove to a parking lot, where she strategically scattered the car’s broken glass all about. She told her parents she’d been the victim of a hit-and-run and they believed her. She’s been making up stories ever since, although she gets paid better for them nowadays.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An excerpt from
What I Love About You
copyright © 2014 by Rachel Gibson.
I DO
! Copyright © 2015 by Rachel Gibson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780062247513
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062247520
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